"There's only so many directions you can go with noir," said Mr. Feiffer, who added that he had had great fun working in a genre where he didn't have to be funny.
Rian Johnson went dark noir via teen angst in his breakout film, Brick, then got all Wes Anderson in The Brothers Bloom.
It's traditional for films about American childhood – think of David Gordon Green's magical, eccentric George Washington or Jeff Nichols's recent Huck-Finn-goes-noir story Mud – to play up a mythic dimension.
A spicy pinot noir goes well with these heavier dishes, and can also carry you through to the cheese course.
One of the relative certainties in the arcane world of food and wine matching is that pinot noir goes with duck.
One goes full-blown noir private eye silent film, while in another we learn of a secret tryst between Homer and the couch.
That view, ignoring the Algerians who were victims of the pieds noirs, goes along with a gauzy picture of Algerian daily life before the war as peaceful and well-integrated.
Weidman's encyclopaedia of political hit-men and women and Gelbart's comedy about the making of a 1940s Hollywood film noir, which goes behind the scenes of the film and inside the head of the writer, each have the dense characterisation and zingy dialogue of a good stage drama.
Make like Lykke Li and go for Nordic Noir instead.
The film is going for Southern noir, but that requires achieving a certain mood, something that takes time.
